Falling Chantry Flat

It was natural that I take my friend, Diane, on a hike up to Chantry Flat in the Big Santa Anita Canyon area. I had an interest in being more than friends. She, unfortunately, couldn’t see past my red hair.

Newly wed adventurers, 1976

We found ourselves on—well, I had carelessly led us to—a cliffy, slippery incline, with seemingly no way up or down. We were stuck. Each step on the decomposed granite felt like we were climbing over marbles. A slip and a fall could mean plummeting several hundred feet into the canyon below. My effort to show my outdoorsman prowess was eroding as fast as the gravel under our feet. What a way to impress this cute girl I was interested in.

I have always loved the wilderness—not just through scenic drive-bys, but by actually getting into the great outdoors. Growing up at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains in Sierra Madre, northeast of Los Angeles, I was out every hot summer day, riding my Schwinn Sting-Ray bike to grand adventures. I explored Bailey Canyon near my house, snuck into the fenced reservoirs above the Little League field for a refreshing, prohibited swim in my underwear, built tree houses, dug holes in the backyard for dinosaur bones or buried treasure (none found, and my father made me fill in my unfinished archaeological sites), pretended I was in a Lost World in the jungle section of the Los Angeles County Arboretum not far from our home, and had epic neighborhood battles with grenade oranges and metal trash can lids, before the orange groves were converted to housing subdivisions.

Nothing changed in my love for the outdoors through high school and into college, except that I could drive to the next adventure. I hiked the Mt. Wilson Trail, trekked Eaton Canyon above Pasadena, overturned ocean tide pool rocks, searching for surprises, camped in Joshua Tree National Park, and photojournaled the California coastline from San Diego to San Francisco. I thought of myself as quite the National Geographic explorer—a combination of Sir Edmund Hillary and Jeremiah Johnson. Truly a legend in my own collegiate mind, at the time.

So it was natural that I take my friend, Diane, on a hike up to Chantry Flat in the Big Santa Anita Canyon area. I had an interest in being more than friends. She, unfortunately, couldn’t see past my red hair, having some kind of mental block against “carrot tops,” perhaps after a bad childhood experience with a circus clown. But I would win her over with a demonstration of my mastery of wilderness exploration.

Chantry Flat is a designated Recreation Area in the Angeles National Forest. An 8.8 mile trail system offers scenic views, shady forested sections, abundant wildlife, a tranquil creek with large boulders, and waterfalls. It’s nice that all this is available so close to the city. And it was a great place for me to show off.

At some point on the trail (this is a bit fuzzy to me years later), and for some reason that now escapes me, I led us off the designated path. I know now, and probably knew then, that this is usually not a good idea. The trail is there for a reason. Not sure what I was thinking. Maybe it was for a better view of the valley. Or a different angle to see the waterfall below. Did I want to separate us from the other hikers for some quiet reflection and conversation? Maybe I did it intentionally to put us in a dangerous situation to show how I could get us out! In any case, here we found ourselves, on a cliff side, slippery gravel under our shoes, stuck, with no clear path up or down.

Humility bears a great weight when it arrives as a result of stupid decisions. I was embarrassed. Great impression I was making! Frozen, more than a bit nervous (although, stoically, I tried not to show it), with nowhere to sit, unable to move any direction without the ground moving too, and closer to the drop-off, we leaned against the cliff wall. Tennis shoes were not the right footwear for this hike, we had no food or water as I remember, and no spend-the-night-on-the-side-of-a-cliff clothing. We evaluated our options. Diane was an athlete, confident, self-reliant; I don’t think she was fully looking to me to solve our dilemma. But I had gotten us into this predicament. I needed to get us out.

We couldn’t go back the way we came, as that was just too steep and slippery. I eyed a small shelf to our right. If we were very careful, took it slowly, had surety with every baby step, I thought we could traverse on a diagonal back up to the trail. We helped each other with hand and footholds and crept upward. Don’t know if Diane could hear my heart beating through my chest.

As evidenced by this report, we made it. Clearly, Diane wasn’t too put off by my bumbling attempt to impress with my wilderness recreational knowledge. She has trusted me to take her down many adventurous trails in life these past 39 years. And this is more than just a metaphor. We camped with our young kids in the valley of Yosemite, have hiked and snowshoed hundreds of trails across the American West, summited mountains, trekked through the Moab desert, and hiked over 350 miles of the Colorado Trail together.